ARTISTS IN ISRAEL AND THE DIASPORA EXPLORE THE INTERSECTIONS OF ART, ZIONISM, AND IDENTITY IN THE NETWORK WORLD IN RELATION TO THEIR LIVES AND ARTWORK.

Sunday, June 27, 2010

On Being a Zionist Artist in a Networked World

by Mel Alexenberg

The great biblical miracle of liberating one nation of
thousands from enslavement in the one country of Egypt after hundreds of years
of exile pales in comparison with the Zionist miracle in our time of liberating
millions of Jews from persecution, pogroms, and the Holocaust in scores of countries
after thousands of years of exile and bringing them home to Israel.Choosing to be an integral part of this
Zionist miracle, unprecedented in world history, offers me enthralling creative
opportunities as an artist.

I draw inspiration from the Zionist challenge of Rabbi Abraham
Isaac Kook to “renew the old and sanctify the new” as
I explore the vibrant interface between the structure of Jewish consciousness,
the realization of the Zionist dream in the State of Israel, and new directions
in art emerging from postdigital creativity in a networked world.

The wellsprings of my Zionism flows
from my Jewish roots and values while the form and content of my art emerges
from Jewish thought and experience in a networked world in which of art,
science, technology, and culture address each other.

As an artist
born and educated in the United
States, I chose to leave a country that I
love and that gave me wonderful professional opportunities to be part of the
Zionist enterprise that permits me to be more fully immersed at the center of
Jewish life.Zionism seeks to ensure the
future and distinctiveness of the Jewish people by fostering Jewish spiritual
and cultural values in its historic homeland (World Zionist Organization,
Jerusalem Program, 2004).As a Zionist
artist I strive to create both an intimate dialogue with the Jewish people and
a lively conversation with people throughout the world.

Art
crossing over into a new realityThe biblical
story of the Jewish people begins with the journey of Abraham as he crosses
over from his all too familiar past to see a fresh vision of a future in a new
land.Indeed, Abraham is called a Hebrew
(Ivri) – one who crosses over into a new reality.Abraham is told: “Go for yourself from
your land, from your birthplace, and from your father’s house to the land that
I will show you.” (Genesis 12:1)This passage can also be read as: “Walk with your authentic self away
from all the familiar and comfortable places that limit vision to a land where
you can freely see.” Here, the dynamic Hebraic mindset is established as new
ways of seeing emerge from the integration of our journey to the Land of Israel with our inner quest for
spiritual significance.

The personal
power of Abraham to leave an obsolete past behind and to cross conceptual
boundaries into an unknown future presents a powerful message to me as a
Zionist artist living in a democratic Jewish State in a postdigital age.Today in Israel and at the leading edge of
technologically advanced societies worldwide, we are beginning to cross over
from the digital culture of the Information Age to a Conceptual Age in which
people in all walks of life will succeed most when they behave like artists who
integrate left-brain with right-brain thinking.Industrial Age factory workers and Information Age knowledge workers are
being superseded by Conceptual Age creators and empathizers who integrate high
tech abilities with high touch and high concept abilities of aesthetic and
spiritual significance.1

Art debunking
artSubverting
idolatry with a twist of irony has been the mission of the Jews from their very
beginning.As a prelude to the biblical
story of Abraham beginning his journey away from his father’s world to the Land of Israel, the Midrash tells that
Abraham was minding his father’s idol shop when he took a stick and smashed the
merchandise to bits.He left only the
largest idol untouched placing the stick in its hand.When his father returned, his shock at seeing
the scene of devastation grew into fury as he demanded an explanation from his
son.Abraham explained how the largest
idol had broken all the other idols.He
could have smashed all the idols without saving one on which to place the
blame.An idol smashing idols gives us
clues for creating art to debunk art, art that aims to undermine undue
reverence for art, art that challenges the established canon of Western
art.

I am interested
in creating art to knock art off its pedestal by displaying a creative
skepticism not just towards art’s subjects but also towards its purposes.In his book on Jewish American painters in
the twentieth century, Ori Soltis comments on my series of Digitized Homage
to Rembrandt paintings, photomontages, computer-generated etchings,
serigraphs, lithographs, and telecommunications events: “Alexenberg
appropriates an iconic image from the Christian art tradition: Rembrandt’s
angel, who wrestles with Jacob.But he
transforms and distorts it, digitalizing and dismembering it, transforming the
normative Western tradition within which he works as he rebels against it.” 2

Art emerging from Hebraic rather than
Hellenistic consciousnessAs a Zionist
artist, I am joining artists worldwide in liberating art from Hellenistic
dominance since its revival in the Renaissance.The 20th century was a century of modernism that aimed to
undermine the Hellenistic definition of art.The 21st century invites a redefinition of art derived from the Hebraic
roots of Western culture rather than its Hellenistic roots.

"The
Greeks and the Jews are the two peoples whose worldviews have most influenced
the way we think and act.Each of them from angles so different has
left us with the inheritance of its
genius and wisdom.No two cities have
counted more with Mankind than
Athens and Jerusalem.Their messages in religion, philosophy, and
art have been the main guiding light
in modern faith and culture.” 3

More than three thousand
years ago, King David moved the capital of ancient Israel fromHebron to
Jerusalem.Five centuries later during
the Golden Age of Athens, the major temples of the Acropolis were built under
the leadership of Pericles.In my
Mediterranean Rim Wikiart Project, a text inviting the participation
of people from the 21 Mediterranean rim countries was posted on my art blog
http://www.wikiartists.us in the many languages of these countries.Only Hebrew and Greek, the millennia old
languages of the indigenous peoples of the Land of Israel and Greece are still
in use and continue to be written with the same two ancient alphabets.

The Hellenistic definition
of art as mimesis is reflected in the words for art in contemporary European
languages: art in English and French, arte in Spanish, Kunst
in German and Dutch, and iskustvo in Russian.The roots of all these words are related to
artificial, artifact, imitation, and phony.In contrast, the Hebrew word for artist (oman) is spelled AMN
with the same letters as the word amen which means truth.Its feminine form is emunah, faith,
and as a verb l’amen means to nurture and educate.

This ancient Greek
view of art as mimesis, imitating nature, arresting the flow of life, has
become obsolete as new definitions of art are arising from Jewish thought and
action that explore issues of truth, faith, and education as they enrich
everyday life.In the classic book Hebrew
Thought Compared with Greek, Hebraic thoughtis characterized as being “dynamic, vigorous,
passionate, and sometimes quite explosive in kind; correspondingly Greek
thinking is static, peaceful, moderate, and harmonious in kind.” 4

That
it is the Hebraic rather than the Hellenistic roots of Western culture that is
redefining art in a rapidly expanding networked world is argued throughout my
books The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness5http://future-of-art.com and its Hebrew version Dialogic Art in a Digital World: Four Essays on
Judaism and Contemporary Art.6Art revealing the power of Hebrew letters
in an era of digital and bio technologiesOne of the Zionist
enterprise’s greatest accomplishments is reviving Hebrew as the common everyday
language uniting Jews who have returned to their homeland speaking scores of
different languages. There is an aesthetic and spiritual power in seeing Hebrew
letters dancing across storefronts in the Jewish State, flashing across TV
screens, Googling and SMSing.Hebrew
letters have a special meaning for the artist.The mishkan’s artist, Betzalel, is said to have had the divine
secret of forging combinations of the 22 Hebrew letters to create new worlds.
The digital era makes this kabbalistic notion of artistic creativity through
making permutations of bits of information more than a quaint legend.

It is computer science rather than mysticism,
physics rather than metaphysics that lets us reveal in our times this ancient
wisdom.All the multitude of words,
sounds and images that we can access today on the Internet, CDs, and DVDs are
encoded in bits strung together in groupings of eight called bytes. The 256 bit
permutations in one byte are in turn grouped into billions of combinations that
we perceive as a web site, a computer game, a text, a song, or a movie.

Jewish tradition
sees the 22 sacred Hebrew letters as profound, primal, spiritual forces, the
raw material of Creation. The numerous
alternative arrangements of the letters in words results in different blends of
cosmic spiritual forces that finds a parallel in natural systems where different
numbers of protons, neutrons, and electrons form the atoms of each of the 92
different elements. These atoms, in turn, combine into molecules, and molecules
into supersized molecules like DNA in which the code of all life’s forms is
written with only four letters: A-T, T-A, and C-G, G-C.

The interplay between combinations and
permutations of Hebrew letters in the spiritualrealm, of atoms and molecules
in the physical realm, and bits and bytes in the realm of digital media,
provides raw materials for creating artworks that generate a lively dialog
between the Jewish past and Israel’s
future as a world center of digital and bio technologies.

Art revealing the spiritual dimensions of everyday life in
the Land of IsraelThe great transgression of ten of the leaders of the
Israelite tribes who were charged to spy out the Land of Israel after their
exodus from Egypt was their inability to discern the difference between hard
work as slaves in Egypt and hard work building their own land.Only Joshua and Calev met the
challenge.The Torah tells us that Calev
of the tribe of Judah
had “a different spirit” (Numbers: 14:24).Unlike the others, he was able to make the
paradigm shift to recognize that the challenge
of living in the Land
of Israel was to see spirituality emerging from all aspects of life.

Ten of the spies chose to remain in the desert where they
could live a totally spiritual existence learning Torah all day.They would not have to work at all since food
was delivered daily for free at the opening of their tents.In the Land of Israel,
they would have to grow their own food, build houses, fight enemies, and
collect garbage which seemed to them like returning to the slavery they had
just left.These ten spies were
sentenced to death in the desert for their inability to see that the spiritual
arises from the quality of one’s encounter with the material world.The descendents of Calev’s tribe of Judea are almost all of the Jews who have the great
privilege of returning to our homeland and rebuilding it 3500 years later.Most of the descendents of the ten spies who
lacked “a different spirit” have disappeared.

Calev’s great-grandson, the prototypic Jewish artist
Betzalel, sets a direction for today’s Zionist artists by having created an
environment that invites holiness into our concrete world – “God walks in the
midst of the camp…therefore shall your camp be holy” (Deuteronomy
23:15).I invited my students at the
School of the Arts at Emuna College in Jerusalem and at Ariel University to
reveal holiness by photographing divine light emanating from their everyday
life in Israel.I created a blog to show
their work: http://www.photographgod.com.

We can
appreciate Calev’s alternative viewpoint through the 20th century experience
of the Rebbe of Sadegora, Rabbi Avraham Freidman (1884-1961). The Nazis
attempted to humiliate the Rebbe in the eyes of his Hasidim by forcing him at
gunpoint to work all day sweeping streets and collecting garbage and at night
to march waving a Nazi flag.The Rebbe
survived the Holocaust and moved to Tel Aviv where he rose early every morning
in the week before Israel Independence Day to join the city’s sanitation
workers in sweeping streets and collecting garbage.At night, he could be seen walking through the
streets of Tel Aviv waving the Israeli flag.He marveled at the great privilege he had to keep his city clean and to
honor his nation’s flag.

Art
conveying its message through form and medium At the beginning
of the 20th century, the first Zionist artists Ephriam Lilien and
Boris Schatz, the artists who participated in the exhibition at the 5th
Zionist Congress in 1901, and the theoreticians of culture Martin Buber and
Ahad Ha’am saw Zionist art only in terms of content and iconography.7
Landscapes of the Land of Israel, Jewish subjects, and biblical scenes
idealizing the Bedouin types as if they were ancient Israelites were the
content of their artwork expressed in alien European forms and media.These first Zionist artists did not liberate
themselves from the Hellenistic definition of art that was plastered over their
Jewish consciousness by centuries of indoctrination living in Europe.

The significance
of form and medium in Jewish life is so strong that we only read the Torah
portion in synagogue from a scroll hand-written on parchment.If we have no Torah scroll, we read nothing
at all rather than read the identical content from a Hebrew Bible printed in a
rectangular codex book form.Tradition
teaches how the Israelites were enslaved in the malben, which means both
brickyard and rectangle. The Torah trapped in a malben between two book
covers cannot convey a message of liberation expressed by a free-flowing spiral
scroll.The heart (spelled LB in
Hebrew) of the Torah is the place where the last letter L in the word yisrael
(Israel)
is linked to the first letter B in b’reshit (In the beginning) in
an endless flow.Both changing form and
medium radically changes the message.A
Torah written on Japanese rice paper is bizarre and one written on pigskin
would be the ultimate anti-Semitic statement.We can recognize the life-affirming parallel between the double spiral
of the Torah scroll and the DNA molecule in which all life forms are
encoded.

To explore form
and media in Jewish thought and experience, I invited fellow artists at MIT’s
Center for Advanced Visual Studies to collaborate with me in creating LightsOROT:
Spiritual Dimensions of the Electronic Age,8 an exhibition for Yeshiva University Museum.Creating art in a digital age in a networked world offers Zionist artists
unprecedented opportunities to invent alternative art forms and explore new
media confluent with the structure of Jewish consciousness.

Art imitating
the Creator rather than the creationI am interested
in being an active partner of the Creator of the universe in the on-going
creation of new worlds.As a Jewish
artist, it is not the Hellenistic vision of a complete and ideal nature to be
copied that is the primary artistic value, but it is the emulation of the process
of creation itself that is valued.Therefore,
I studied in depth the creative process in art and science from a psychodynamic
point of view that I present in my book Aesthetic Experience in Creative
Process.9

Two millennia
ago, the Roman governor over the Land
of Israel asked Rabbi
Akiva, “Which are greater and more beautiful, human creations or God’s?”The governor was disturbed by the rabbi’s
response that human creation is more exalted than divine creation.While the Roman was questioning the rabbi’s
unexpected response, the rabbi served a plate of wheat grains to the Roman and
took cakes for himself.The puzzled
Roman asked, “Why do you take cakes for yourself while you give me raw grains
of wheat?”Rabbi Akiva answered, “You prefer
God’s creation.I prefer the creations
of human hands!”

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, first Chief
Rabbi of the Land of Israel and founder of Yeshivat Mercaz ha’Rav in Jerusalem, provides a
poetic manifesto for the Zionist artist derived from the deep structure of Jewish
consciousness:"Whoever
is endowed with the soul of a creator must create works of imagination and thought, for the flame of the soul rises
by itself and one cannot impede it on its course…. The creative individual brings vital, new light from the higher
source where originality emanates
to the place where it has not previously been manifest, from the place that “no
bird of prey knows, nor has the
falcon’s eye seen.” (Job 28:7), “that no man has passed, nor has any person dwelt” (Jeremiah
2:6)." 10

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, who
served as president of the Mizrachi Zionists of America, proposes that the
dream of creation is the central idea in Jewish consciousness – the idea of the
importance of human partnership with the Almighty in creating new worlds.He writes:

"This longing for creation and the
renewal of the cosmos is embodied in all of Judaism’s goals….If a man wishes to
attain the rank of holiness, he must become a creator of worlds.If a man never creates, never brings into being anything new, anything
original, then he cannot be holy
unto his God.That passive type who is
derelict in fulfilling his task
of creation cannot become holy.Creation
is the lowering of transcendence into the midst
of our turbid, coarse, material world. 11

I attempt to act
as partner of the Creator during six days of the week.However, I stop my creative work one day each
week and step back to admire and honor the handiwork of the Creator of the
universe.This Sabbath Day is both a
Non-Art Day and an Ecology Day.Emulating Betzalel and his artistic collaborators who stopped building
the mishkan on Shabbat, I stop my artistic activities on the seventh day
to celebrate Non-Art Day.Indeed, all
Shabbat observance is defined by artistic activity, by the 39 craft categories
involved in building the mishkan.From when the sun sets on Friday evening to the time stars dot the sky
on Saturday night, I celebrate Non-Art Day as well as Ecology Day by leaving
the world they way I got it.I replenish
my soul on Shabbat so that on the eighth day I can resume with renewed energies
the role of partner with the Creator in tikun olam, actively making the
world a better place for all humanity.

Art
engaging the Torah in a playful spiritAs an artist, I
engage the Torah in creative play through both my conceptual and aesthetic
explorations. The Torah itself teaches us to approach it in a playful
spirit.In Psalm 119:174, we
read: “Your Torah is my plaything(sha’ashua).”Sha’ashua is a toy to engage children
in play.In Proverbs 8:30, 31,
King Solomon speaks in the voice of the Torah:“I [the Torah] was the
artist’s plan.I was His [God’s] delight
every day, playing before Him at all times, playing in the inhabited areas of
His earth, my delights are with human beings.”This translation from the Hebrew original is based on the ancient wisdom
on the first page of Midrash Rabba. God as the master artist played
creatively with the Torah, His plan for creating the universe.Midrash Rabba uses these two verses
from Proverbs to explain the first words of the Torah, “In the beginning
God created.”God first created
“Beginning” referring to the Torah as an open-ended blueprint for creating the
world.We learn this from an earlier
verse, Proverbs 8:22, “God made me [the Torah] as the beginning of His
way, before His deeds of yore.”In human
emulation of God’s delight, we are invited to play with the Torah as we create
new worlds.

Rabbi Abraham
Isaac Kook wrote a letter of congratulations on the founding of the Betzalel Art
School in Jerusalem in 1906.By way of allegory, he refers to the revival
of Jewish art and aesthetics after two thousand years of exile as a child in a
coma who awakes calling for her doll."The pleasant and beloved child, the delightful daughter, after
a long and forlorn illness, with a face
as pallid as plaster, bluish lips, fever burning like a fiery furnace, and convulsive shaking and trembling,
behold!She has opened her eyes and her
tightly sealed lips, her little hands
move with renewed life, her thin pure fingers wander hither and thither, seeking their purpose;
her lips move and almost revert to their normal color, and as if through a medium a voice is heard: “Mother,
Mother, the doll, give me the doll, the
dear doll, which I have not seen for so long.”A voice of mirth and a voice of gladness,
all are joyous, the father, the mother, the brothers and sisters, even the
elderly man and woman who, because
of their many years, have forgotten their children’s games." 12

Rabbi Kook saw
artists at work as a clear sign of the rebirth of the Jewish people in its
homeland.Their playful spirit nurturing
sensitivity for beauty “will uplift depressed souls, giving them a clear and
illuminating view of the beauty of life, nature, and work.” 13

Art education
through visual midrashNot only are the Hebrew words for ‘artist’ and ‘educating’
related, but the Torah teaches that Betzalel and Oholiav are divinely endowed
with artistic talent coupled with the talent to teach (Exodus 35:30-34). Creating art can be an alternative method of
Torah study that beautifies the mitzvah of study through creating visual midrash.Midrash
is the unique Jewish literary form that combines commentary,
legend, and narrative explanations of biblical texts.In a sense, midrash fills the spaces between the written words to reveal deeper
meanings of scriptural passages.Art as
visual midrash provides fresh commentaries on biblical texts through
multimedia experiences that extend the verbal exploration of text into visual
realms.‘Context’ in its primal meaning
is ‘with text’14 while context is the defining characteristic of postmodern
art.15

In order to better
understand the cultural context of my values as a Zionist artist in an era of
globalization, I invited renowned art educators worldwide to redefine art and
art education at the interdisciplinary interface where scientific inquiry and
new technologies shape aesthetic and cultural values – local and global.This inquiry resulted in my book Educating
Artists for the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science,
Technology, and Culture.16

Art
education through community involvementThe Torah
describes two prototypic Jewish artists – Betzalel and Oholiav.“See,
I have called by name: Betzalel ben Uri ben Hur, of the tribe of Judah.I have filled him with a divine spirit, with
wisdom, understanding, and knowledge, and with the talent for all types of
craftsmanship” (Exodus 31:2).The
literal translation of this artist’s name is: “In the Divine Shadow son of
Fiery Light son of Freedom.”It honors
the artist’s passion and freedom of expression.The Torah describes Betzalel’s partner, “I have assigned with him
Oholiav ben Ahisamakh of the tribe of Dan, and I have placed wisdom
in the heart of every naturally talented person” (Exodus 31:6).Oholiav’s full name means “My Tent of
Reliance on Father, Son, and My Brother,” integrating the contemporary with its
past and future.Father, son, and
brother stand together with the artist in a common tent in mutual support of
one another.Betzalel represents the
psychological power of the artist and Oholiav the sociological impact on
community.Working together, they create
a shared environment of spiritual power.

My wife, artist
Miriam Benjamin, and I collaborated with elders and youth from different ethnic
communities in creating Legacy Thrones, monumental works of public art
in Miami.17 In Israel, we created an
Institute for Arts and Jewish Life in Yeroham to educate art teachers for
community centers.We lived in Yeroham
for seven years where we taught students from throughout Israel and the
Diaspora to integrate the creative energies of Betzalel with the impact on
community of Oholiav.

Art revealing
beauty inprocesses of liberation and creation Zionism and the
visual arts interface as they emerge from the core values of Judaism as
expressed in the Ten Commandments, which begins:“I am YHVH (Was-Is-Will Be), your God,
who has taken you out of the Land
of Egypt (Narrow
Straits), out of the House of Slavery.Do not have any other gods before Me.You shall not make yourself any carved statue or picture of anything in
the heaven above, on the earth below, or the water beneath the land.” (Exodus
20:1-14, repeated in Deuteronomy 5:6-18)

The biblical
divine name YHVH is associated with beauty (tiferet) and the
historic process of attaining freedom from slavery. YHVH is a verb, not
a noun, combining the Hebrew words for was, is and will be,
a process in time.YHVH is boththe Liberator from narrowness and the Creator of the heaven, earth, and
water.The biblical name for Egypt, mitzrayim, literally means from
narrow straits, to teach that national liberation is the process of
attaining independence from narrow-mindedness to experiencing expansive freedom
in the Land of Israel.Indeed,when Moses sent
scouts to explore the Land
of Israel from the
wilderness of Tzin to Rehov (Numbers 13:21). Joshua sent scouts
four decades later who arrived at the house of Rahav (Joshua
1:1).Rahav and Rehov
mean wide expanses.Having left
slavery in the narrow straits the Israelites headed toward the freedom of wide
expanses in their own land.

God is One, both
Liberator from narrow straits and Creator of the wide expanses of heaven,
earth, and water.Was-Is-Will Be is the
Liberator from ancient Egypt’s
cult of the dead and the Creator of a world overflowing with vibrant life. As a
Jewish artist, I avoid creating art that freezes the lively process of creation
and the dynamic process of liberation, arresting them in fixed images. I avoid
stilling life meant to flow freely or solidifying in stone that which is in
flux.

The Israelites exodus from Egypt’s
narrow straits, from the land of the Book of the Dead and its immovable
pyramids led to a process of liberation in the wide expanse of the desert,
where they received of the Book of Life (torat chaim), and built a
Lego-like moveable mishkan deconstructed and reconstructed numerous
times during their four-decade journey.The Zionist challenge then as now is to settle in the Land of Israel
with the expansive viewpoint of movement in the open desert without regressing
to the narrow viewpoint engendered by a sedentary mentality.It is a land that devourers yoshveha,
its inhabitants who sit still (Numbers 13:32) rather than those who are
on the go (Genesis 12:1).Those
residents of the Land
of Israel who are not
passive, but actively create movement, growth, and change are not in danger of
being consumed.

An authentic Zionist arts movement
encourages artists to create transformative artworks and adventuresome artforms
that not only explore the intersections of Zionism and the arts, but reveal
beauty in the dynamic processes of liberation and creation.Theodor Herzl wrote in his visionary Zionist
novel Altneuland (Old-New
Land): "Beauty and
wisdom do not die because their creators die.Just as the conservation of energy
is self-evident, so must we infer that there is conservation of beauty and wisdom…. Have the sayings of our ancient sages
perished? No, their flame burns brightly,
even if in happy times it is less clearly visible than in dark days, like all
flames.And
what should we learn from this?That we
should strive to increase beauty and wisdom
in this earth, as long as we live." 18

Art
expressing love for the land of IsraelRabbi Kook
stresses the intrinsic bond between the Land of Israel
and the Jewish People that extends to a call to delight and rejoice in the
beauty of the land: "The Land of Israel
is not something external, not an external national asset, a means to the end of collective solidarity and the
strengthening of the nation’s existence, physical or even spiritual.The Land of Israel is an essential unit bound by the
bond-of-life to the People, united by
inner characteristics to its existence." 19 "See
the splendor of an attractive land, the splendor of the Carmel
and the Sharon,
thesplendor of the pleasant and
beautiful azure skies, the magnificence of the clear, pure, temperate air that reigns in its majesty
and glory.Delight and rejoice in this
desirable, fair and pleasing land,
a land of life, a land whose air is the wellspring of the spirit.How beautiful
and how graceful she is!" 20

Some of my
earliest memories form the beginnings of my education as a Zionist artist.I remember sitting on the counter in my
grandfather’s Hebrew bookshop on Coney
Island Avenue in Brooklyn in the 1940’s surrounded
by images of the Land of Israel in the calendars, postcards, posters, and
metal relief pictures from the Bezalel workshops in Jerusalem that he sold.I would often watch him carving mezuzot
from mother-of-pearl and olive wood imported from Israel.My grandfather, Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Kahn,
left the Telz Yeshiva in Lithuania
in 1900 to participate in the 4th Zionist Congress in London never to
return.He settled to Boston where he was married and my mother was
born.When he passed away four years
before his Zionist dream was realized in 1948, my grandmother came to live with
us.When I came home from school, she
spread out the Yiddish newspaper on the kitchen table for us to sit together
and search for pictures of Israel
which we would cut out and paste in scrap books.On quiet Shabbat afternoons, we would often
sit together immersed in a virtual journey to the Land of Israel
through our scrap books.

When I first
came to Israel
in 1969, I sensed I had been there many times before.I had fallen in love years before in New York
with Israel’s diverse landscape, from the green hills of the Galilee to the
Negev desert where my son and his family now live, from Petah Tikva where I
live to Jerusalem where I work, from the Dead Sea to the coral reefs of Eilat,
from the surf at the Tel Aviv beach to the Western Wall, and from mountainous
Tzfat to the Ramon Crater.This love of
the land urges Zionist artists to explore, articulate, express, and document
the landscape, from its gentle beauty to its overwhelming magnificence, and to create
earth art and ecological artworks to honor the land.

The artist Ezra Orion
organized an environmental art event in which ten Israeli artists were invited
to create works of earth art at Sodom at the
southern end of the Dead Sea on Purim 5744/1984.I appropriated a hill blocking the wadi
between the mountain ranges of Moab
and Edom to create an earth
artwork relating Sodom
to Purim: http://www.melalexenberg.com/artworks/Sodom.doc.

Art creating
dialog between Israel and the DiasporaAlthough living
in Israel
by a Jewish calendar, speaking Hebrew, walking on the soil of our ancestors is
the Zionist ideal, the networked world provides unprecedented opportunities for
Jewish artists in the homeland and those in the Diaspora to creatively interact
with each other. Internet 2.0 generates alternative frameworks for global
communities to form and flourish.Zionist artists can form virtual communities spreading rhizome-like
across the surface of the globe.Israel
becoming the central node in these worldwide communities is the realization of
the dream of the cultural Zionists led by Ahad Ha’am at the First Zionist
Congress in 1897.In addition, artists
share their creative works through their websites, blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Rhizome,
LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.Particularly vital to
the Zionist future is creative dialog and collaboration between the two largest
Jewish communities.Through inspired
partnerships between artists in Israel,
the world center of Jewish culture, and artists in the USA, the world center of artistic
innovation, a new Zionist energy will emerge and flourish.

In addition to energizing the
creative dialog between Jews in Israel
and United States,
it is important to the Zionist enterprise in a networked world to establish a
creative dialog between Israelis and Americans of diverse backgrounds.To realize this extended dialog, I created a
work of participatory blogart ‘JerUSAlem-USA’ linking the twenty places in the United States called ‘Jerusalem’
with the original in Israel:
http://jerusalem-usa.blogspot.com. In this collaborative artwork, Americans
send photographs of Jerusalems in USA
to which Israelis respond with matched images of Jerusalem
in Israel.This digital dialog creates an interactive
network of people with shared values that deepens friendships between them.

The
Lubavicher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, teaches:"The divine
purpose of the present information revolution, which gives an individual unprecedented power and opportunity,
is to allow us to share knowledge - spiritual knowledge
– with each other, empowering and unifying individuals everywhere.We need
to use today’s interactive technology not just for business or leisure but to
interlink as people – to create a
welcome environment for the interaction of our souls, our hearts, our visions." 21

Art confronting
hatred, bigotry, racism, terrorism, and cults of death with moral outrage In the tradition
of Picasso’s Guernica,I have created
a work of webart http://www.futureholocaustmemorials.org
to warn the world of Iran’s
quest for a nuclear bomb to “wipe Israel off the map.” Just as the
world’s acquiesce to Hitler’s raining bombs on the Basque village Guernica gave
him the license to proceed with preparing for WW II and exterminating the Jews
of Europe on his way to global conquest, the world’s indifference to the
thousands of rockets launched against Israel by Iran’s proxy armies, Hamas and
Hizbullah, are empowering Iran to incinerate the Jews of Israel as a
prelude to the Islamist’s global jihad.

My webart cries out “Never Again!” to
the apathetic worldof nations that did little to prevent the murder of six million Jews in
Europe or collaborated with the Nazis in their
extermination.It issues a powerful
warning to these same nations now pressuring the Jews, the indigenous people of
the Land of Israel, to surrender its historic
heartland for establishing a Palestinian terrorist state.It exposes the fact that the majority of the
Arabs living in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza freely elected the Iranian proxy Hamas thugs whose
genocidal charter reads:“Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish
population, defies Islam and the Muslims…. Muslims will fight the Jews…for the
sake of Allah! I will assault and kill, assault and kill, assault and kill.”

Art promoting an aesthetic
peace between the Jewish State and its neighborsPursuing peace is a central value
of Judaism.The Hebrew word for peace, shalom,
is mentioned 237 times in the Hebrew Bible and scores of times in the Jewish
liturgy. Peace is offered in Israel’s
Declaration of Independence: “We
extend our hand to all neighboring states and their peoples in an offer of
peace and good neighborliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of
cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own
land.”

Despite virulent Islamist
anti-Semitism and genocidal aims, Israel continues to seek
peace.However, all political processes and
road maps from Oslo
to Obama are doomed to failure because the Arab conflict is not political but rather
an aesthetic problem that calls for an artistic solution. In my artwork Aesthetic Peace Plan for the
Middle East exhibited at the Jewish Museum of Prague22 and on
the Internet at http://aestheticpeace.blogspot.com, I propose an aesthetic
solution that creates a new metaphor for peace derived from Islamic art and
thought.

Islamic art
teaches Arabs to see their world as a continuous geometric pattern that extends
across North Africa and the Middle East.They see Israel as a blemish that disrupts the
pattern.It is viewed as an alien
presence that they have continually tried to eliminate through war, terrorism,
and political action.A perceptual shift
that can lead to a genuine peace can be derived from Islamic art and
thought.

In Islamic art, a uniform
geometric pattern is purposely disrupted by the introduction of a
counter-pattern that demonstrates that human creation is less than
perfect.Since Islam believes that only
Allah creates perfection, rug weavers from Islamic lands intentionally weave a
patch of dissimilar pattern to break the symmetry of their rugs.

Peace will come
from a fresh metaphor in which the Islamic world sees Israel’s existence as Allah’s
will.A shift in viewpoint where Israel
is perceived as the necessary counter-pattern in the overall pattern of the
Islamic world will usher in an era of peace.The Koran (Sura 17:104) teaches that the ingathering of
the Jewish people into its historic homeland in the midst of the Islamic world
is the fulfillment of Mohammed’s prophecy: “And we said to the Children of
Israel, ‘scatter and live all over the world…and when the end of the world is
near we will gather you again into the Promised Land.’”

Art
combining pride in roots with an overview of the world as seen by othersThe ingathering
of the Jewish people into their ancestral homeland of Israel at the
time that many other peoples are being dispersed into new host countries would
seem to be a countertrend to the powerful forces of globalization.However, the rebirth of the Jewish State and
the ingathering of the exiles plant roots that provide the sure footing
required to play the fast-moving globalization game.Sixty years after its rebirth, Israel
has emerged as a major player in the global world of hi-tech.Vibrant Zionist
art draws on the creative tension and energetic interplay between subjugation
and freedom, between narrow unidirectional thought and open-ended systems
thought, between spiritual and material realms, between traditional values and
scientific and technological development, between war and peace, between hatred
and brotherhood, between local action and global outreach, and between being
rooted in one’s own culture and exploring others.This tension and interplay is the stimulus
and raw material for creating art to revitalize Jewish culture while offering
fresh directions for the growth of art globally.

Art thatenables the mundane to rise up from the Land of Israel and touch the
DivineI draw on Rabbi
Yohanan's words in Tractate Taanit in the Babylonian Talmud to conclude
this essay. God declared: "I will not come to the heavenly Jerusalem
before coming to the earthly Jerusalem."As Zionist artists, my wife and I have the great privilege to explore
the dynamic interface between aesthetic and spiritual energies revealed in our
earthly encounters with everyday life in the Land of Israel.

The networked
world offers the blog as an ideal Jewish art form. A blog is a web log, an
active diary of a living process, rather than still life entombed in a golden
frame. Blogart is a new postdigital art form that my wife, artist Miriam
Benjamin, and I used to celebrate our 52nd year of marriage living in Petah
Tikva (Opening to Hope). We celebrated our love by collaborating on our
"Torah Tweets" blogart project http://bibleblogyourlife.blogspot.com.

During each of
the 52 weeks of our 52nd year, we posted six photographs reflecting our life
together with a Torah tweet text that related the weekly Torah reading to our
lives, past and present.The seventh
photograph does not exist since Shabbat is a Non-Art Day on which we tune out,
turn off, unplug, and honor the Creator rather than our creations.

The blog creates
a dialogue between images and text.The
images are observations of spirituality in our everyday life.The text is composed as "tweets,"
sentences of not more that 140 characters required by the Twitter social
networking website. 140 is the numerical value (gematria) of the Hebrew
word hakel, which means to gather people together to share a Torah
learning experience as in Leviticus 8:3 and Deuteronomy 4:10.

The conceptual background of the "Torah Tweets" blogart project are explored in my book Photograph God: Creating a Spiritual Blog of Your Life http://photographgod.com.

The introductory
quotations that we posted as the top blogspot gadget emphasize the centrality
of down-to-earth spirituality in Judaism from the viewpoints of Talmud scholar Rabbi
J. B. Soloveitchik, Hasidic Rebbe M. M. Schneerson, and American novelist E. L.
Doctorow.Like instruments in an
orchestra, A. Y. Kook, Chief Rabbi of the Land of Israel at the beginning of
the 20th century, sees individual actions combine into a symphony of Jews
acting together as a nation in their own land to empower the mundane to touch
the Divine.This is the essence of the
Zionist challenge.

"Judaism
does not direct its glaze upward but downward ... does not aspire to a heavenly
transcendence, nor does it seek to soar upon the wings of some abstract,
mysterious spirituality. It fixes its gaze upon concrete, empirical reality
permeating every nook and cranny of life. The marketplace, the street, the
house, the mall, the banquet hall, all constitute the backdrop of religious
life.23 ///// It is not enough for the Jew to rest content with his
own spiritual ascent, the elevation of his soul in closeness to G-d, he must
strive to draw spirituality down into the world and into every part of it - the
world of his work and his social life - until not only do they not distract him
from his pursuit of G-d, but they become a full part of it.24 /////
If there is a religious agency in our lives, it has to appear in the manner of
our times. Not from on high, but a revelation that hides itself in our culture,
it will be ground-level, on the street, it'll be coming down the avenue in the
traffic, hard to tell apart from anything else.25 ///// The first
message that Moses chose to teach the Jewish people as they were about to enter
the Land of Israel was to fuse heaven to earth, to enable the mundane to rise
up and touch the Divine, the spiritual to vitalize the physical, not only as
individuals but as an entire nation." 26

Mel
Alexenberg is professor emeritus at Ariel University where he taught the
courses: “Art in Jewish Thought” and “Judaism and Zionism: Values and
Roots.”He is former professor of art
and education at Columbia University and Bar Ilan University, head of the art
department at Pratt Institute, dean at New World School of the Arts in Miami, head
of Emunah College School of the Arts in Jerusalem, and research fellow at MIT’s
Center for Advanced Visual Studies.

His artworks exploring digital
technology and global systems are in the collections of more than forty museums
worldwide, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to the Jewish Museum
in Prague to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.He is author of The Future
of Art in a Postdigital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness and
Educating Artists for the Future (both published by Intellect
Books/University of Chicago Press), Aesthetic Experience in Creative
Process (Bar Ilan University Press), Photograph God: Creating a
Spiritual Blog of Your Life (CreateSpace), and in Hebrew Dialogic Art in
a Digital World: Four Essays on Judaism and Contemporary Art (Jerusalem:
Rubin Mass House).

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INVITATION TO ARTISTS IN ISRAEL AND THE DIASPORA

Artists are invited to contribute an essay for this blog and planned book Art, Zionism, and Identity in the Networked World.

Your autobiographical essay should explore your life and artwork in relation to Zionism and the ubiquitous networked world that intertwines life in Israel, life as a Jew in the Diaspora, and new directions in the arts emerging globally in our postdigital age. E-mail your essay to melalexenberg@yahoo.com as a Word document of 4,000 and 6,000 words.

Consider that the great biblical miracle of liberating one nation of thousands from enslavement in the one country of Egypt after hundreds of years of exile pales in comparison with the Zionist miracle in our time of liberating millions of Jews from persecution, pogroms, and the Holocaust in scores of countries after thousands of years of exile and bringing them home to Israel.